Clive James' culture bath

"Il n'y a pas de genres, il n'y a que des talents". This quote by Jean François Revel is one of the many trufles to be found in "Cultural Amnesia", the great partial summation of a lifetime of reading and pontificating by Clive James, the Australian critic and TV personality. The quote and the book, which I spent a feverish summer day fevereshly reading in bed, make an implicit case for great journalism which I entirely subscribe and add to by arguing that newspaper and magazine writing provide a much better literary training than is to be found in academia. Endlessly entertaining and generally wise, even if occasionally corny, "Cultural Amnesia",a collection of "over a hundred essays", as the backpage helpfully points out, about cultural figures mainly from the XXth century, rescues from oblivion dozens of worthy writers. I found the book particularly illuminating on such topics as Vienese café society before the Anchluss, French collaborationists and the German intellectual scene after WWII.